This invention relates to the provision of buildings and other locations with optical fibre elements.
A method for providing a building or other location with an optical fibre element by propelling the element along a previously installed duct using the fluid drag of a gaseous medium is described in European Patent Application NO: 108,590. This method has a number of advantages over prior methods of installation of optical fibres such as pulling the fibre cables by means of a pulling rope. In particular, because the gaseous medium imparts a distributed motive force along the length of the optical fibre clement, stresses on optical fibre are reduced, especially where the route that the optical fibre is to take contains a number of bends. In such a case, pulling the optical fibre element along the route with a pulling cord would cause frictional drag on the fibre at the bends in the duct and, as stated in the application, only a few bends would be sufficient to cause locking of the optical fibre element.
Although this method of installing optical fibres is very successful, it has the disadvantage that the optical fibres must be terminated with connectors on site with the result that the quality of the termination may be poor and in any case is not under the control of the cable or connector manufacturer.